In Which Holy Mother Church Scares the Post

Patrick Sexton is the official Don't Hurt Us correspondent for The Washington Post, a once-great newspaper now d/b/a an adjunct of the educational-testing scam. This weekend, he pondered deeply the question of why Catholics want to hurt the Post and how the Post can avoid having the ruler dropped on its knuckles. Now, any thinking journalist would look at the "evidence" amassed by the newspaper's critics in this regard and determine that the whole lot of them would be better off with one-way tickets to the cracker factory. (Catholics are upset about an ad? Tough. Buy one of your own. You've got the money. And keep the damn incense to yourselves. It takes forever to get the smell out of the drapes.) However, it is Patrick's thankless job to take loopheads and their arguments seriously, so Patrick has to tie himself and his paper to the whipping post and produce dreck like this....

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Still, many Catholic readers, particularly conservative ones, and the Catholic hierarchy at the Archdiocese of Washington and at the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, whom I spoke with at length last week, say that The Post just doesn't get Catholics.

Let us be clear. Any story that references "the Catholic hierarchy" and doesn't include the phrases "international conspiracy to obstruct justice" and/or "accessories after the fact" is already being overly fair to the organization in question. Undaunted, Patrick continues with the work of pulling out his own fingernails and eating them.

Catholic Charities is the largest non-government social service agency in the area, for example, and it rarely gets covered, they say. Catholic schools have conducted a massive education program, nationally and locally, to train students, teachers and aides to recognize the signs of child abuse, in the wake of the priest sex scandals, but it is hard to get coverage of that effort. Liberal Catholic groups are quoted, but conservative or official voices not as much, they say.

Alas, this is all the pope's nose. We have been inundated with stories about Catholic Charities, most of them written in bitter tears because state anti-discrimination statutes have made it inconvenient for Catholic Charities to discriminate in the area of adoption. I hope it's not necessary to go into detail as to why Catholic schools embarked on that "massive education program" regarding child abuse. (Hint: it kept them from having to mortgage St. Peter's Basilica to pay out even more money in settlements.) And that last sentence is just arrant nonsense. We didn't hear enough from the hierarchy when they began jacking the president around on contraception? The problem they have is that dissenting voices are out there being heard at all. That wasn't the way it worked when Spellman was blackjacking the New York tabloids back in the day, I'll tell you that.